Director, Telecom Planning and Services,

National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, Egypt

Christine Arida is director for telecom planning and services at the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA). Prior to taking this position in March 2006, she worked, from September 2001, at the Telecom Strategic and Technical Planning Department of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, during which time she was involved in various initiatives serving Egypt’s goal of establishing an information society. She began her career at the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre as a network engineer in charge of DNS operation and Internet access, and was a member of the team that introduced the Internet in Egypt.

Ms. Arida is an active member of the global Internet community. She is a member of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Advisory Group, the Egyptian Working Group on Internet Governance and the Egyptian chapter of the Internet Society. She has served as co-chair of the Arab League working group on Arabic domain names and is a former chair of the Arabic Internet Names Consortium (AINC). She has also been involved in setting up an Arabic domain names test bed in Egypt, the establishment of the AfriNIC Mirror Center for Technical Operation in Cairo and the launch of a regional resolution server in Egypt in cooperation with VeriSign.